Metro Rivals Development Suspended

Not trying to start an argument or try and say somebody's wrong, but i am curious about those of you that like the underground trains and routes, don't you find them dull at all, i mean it's mostly just driving through blackness with the odd stop, is it the challenge to stay on time that drives you, i am genuinely curious about this.

 

Don't forget all the people who want Eurostar London-Paris and drive through the channel tunnel

 

I don’t really like them, it was just an idea of literally anything that would be more enticing for the community you’re depending on to actually support a new project.

With Matt previously discussing how unsustainable underground lines are for TSW, it would be a good idea to put a team together & focus solely on that, especially given how lighting is in TSW, it would have been a great thing to try out in a UE5 environment.

 

London-Paris isn’t a fully tunnelled route

 

No kidding

 

Actually alot underground/subway/metro lines have signifigant surface section so its not all in a tunnel.

New York is a good example pretty much any line outside the Isle of Manhattan is pretty much surface or elevated. And the scenery density big because of it being such an urban area.

So its not all just dark and gloomy.

Montreal is an exception but that is because their rolling stock uses rubber tyres so they would not be efficient in winter on the surface, sonit needs to be 100% underground and yes would not be as fun I would think.

 

Metro routes are not only underground. The trains itself are not dull too, I think you can compare them with S-bahn / commuter trains, only driving at some lower speed. So I actually like to see some metro routes or a dedicated metro game.

 

I mean a year-old financial statement is hardly current- i'll be interested to see the new figures for year ending March 31st 2026. The overall state of the games industry is in a much worse position than it was a year ago and while it's clear that concurrent player numbers are an imperfect metric, WoS doesn't show any signs of being a big seller- certainly not breaking out into a wider gaming audience.

Just saying that cancelling a game that was due to launch in a few months and laying off a bunch of staff is not a sign of healthy finances. Not every project is successful but the timing and seemingly advanced state of development at the time of cancellation are troubling signs imo.

Fwiw i absoutely do not hope for DTG to go bankrupt- besides the awful collateral damage to their employees, it's far from clear another dev would step into their shoes anytime soon, if ever. I want to keep playing train sims!

I just think those crowing "i don't care this won't affect me since i only play TSW" are perhaps burying their heads in the sand a little bit.

 

You comment makes little sense, a London-Paris route isn’t really the same as an underground route

 

The NY Subway tunnels are also quite spacious even cavernous, compared to the likes of Bakerloo and the other deep surface London tube lines. Almost a subterranean architectural world of its own.

 

i wondering if they have game back up incase they later return to it.

 

To be fair I think it is a bit of a fair fetched notion. Both JT & AAS are in the process of bringing the largest scopes of content we’ve seen yet, hardly the sign of a sudden death.

I think DTG has made some strategic errors lately though which is perhaps why first party content has died down & also why Rivet seemed to have taken control of in house development, but they may just go back to a more stable hand on TSW, now that Thomas, Viewapp & Rivals are done with.

I just hope that the one thing they’ve learned here is that they have a huge responsibility to console users in particular. Third parties can’t test content on console, which is pretty insane that they are essentially blindly developing for those platforms. They also made their bed with wanting complete control over new content, so they need to get used to the idea that they are responsible for all the things that control entails.

 

As this is suspended, not cancelled, could development resume at some point in the future perhaps?

 

Indeed, the demo clip seemed to show a fairly advanced build, both in terms of the game environment, rolling stock and even the Wipeout style boosters. Which is why I’m still wondering if external factors like MTA played a part.

 

The most recent one is from Q3 last year, so about 4 Months old.

 

Looks can be deceiving to be fair, I suspect gameplay direction was a big issue. A comparison here may be Ark Raiders, they did a really interesting 3 part documentary on the development of the game & within it they discussed essentially building several ‘full’ games that they couldn’t release, because beyond the world & features they’d created there was just no path for a meaningful gameplay loop, eventually leading to the incredibly successful release they had, which was essentially done by taking the project in another direction.

When you look at Rivals, you have to ask how on earth you evolve a gang territory dispute game, into a train game & then have those things come together to create a gameplay loop that people are interested in. Either you make a criminal enterprise game or you make a version of Crazy Taxi on rails, but even then, the biggest thing in gaming these days is monetisation. Good luck doing that with whoever you’re marketing that gender mashup toward. They may aswell have hired more teams to just pump out more TSW content, but I guess the goal here was diversifying their portfolio.

 

I don't believe I ever said a sudden death but the business world moves quickly for sure.

Don't forget that financial statements are backwards-looking by definition- could business conditions be markedly different between the beginning of that reporting period in April 2024 (for the year ending 3/31/25) and now? A cursory look at global, financial, and gaming industry news during that time would suggest it's very possible. So, we have to consider that maybe their own internal forecasts aren't looking too rosy.

And, remember DTG don't control their own fate anymore- Focus will have targets for them to meet and we have no way of knowing that. All we can do is try to read the tea leaves.

Hopefully you're right though! Very good points on console testing btw- it's a terrible situation currently.

 

I didn't say that at all

 

Yeah it wasn’t really a direct response to you, in the end I do agree there’s likely trouble but it’s more just a lack of direction than anything else. A lot of companies on the back of Covid just seem to be under the illusion they can have unlimited growth, try to push for it & in the end push customers away.

I certainly don’t think TSW is in ‘oh LOVE’ levels of trouble though, they just need to calm down with the greed & stabilise production.

 

Can't blame DTG for trying to diversify, it's a good business strategy but it doesn't always work out for many, many reasons.

I guess the focus will be on the titles that are performing and, from a purely selfish point of view, I hope that means the MR team are absorbed into the TSW team so we can have a greater choice of content. Plus, some experimental elements may have proven useful for the development of TSW.

Nor do I see anything DTG have done with TSW as "greed". A drive for a good profit margin is what keeps businesses afloat and will keep TSW alive. While we may not always agree with DTGs strategy or have other gripes, I remain convinced that Matt and the team want to make all of their titles as good as possible. But some issues aren't resolved overnight. If they were AI would be a competent alternative to humans and I'd be heading out to the studio shortly in my self-driving car.

 

Someone who knows about tax law can correct me as I’m going off of what US based movie studios have been up to, so they’ll film a movie and have it pretty much complete and then cancel it, write it off as a loss for a tax break. If Metro Rivals was projected to make less than it cost to produce it seems like it would be beneficial for DTG to cancel the project to effectively get back all they spent as a tax refund as opposed to making a loss by releasing it?

 

LOL 1st thing i learned running a business, get an accountant cuz that stuffs scary

 

This is quite an interesting development with MR and not something I expected but as said it could possibly be good for TSW but then on the financial side you have to wonder how much money they already put into it just for it to get suspended? Honestly it never really interested me as a game but I feel for the people working on it that this is going to affect

It makes you wonder if there is anything else up DTGs sleeve? Are they focusing on some stuff for WOS? Because that has real potential to be something amazing but it's a bit empty and lifeless at the moment for me personally but has some great concepts. Love the shunting puzzle idea, love the stories and there's potential for the timetable to be special!

On the TSW side third party's are basically carrying in in my opinion. I think there's a lot to be made from TSW if DTG could step up their game and be a little more like TSG, JT and Firefly. Don't just release content for the sake of it but put the time and detail into making it great. Before Rivet took over the UK routes DTGs were actually getting quite good and there was a definite increase in quality.

 

That’s certainly possible. I don’t know if they can get all the dev costs back but it would certainly go down as a loss and reduce their tax bill.

 

I hope not.
Focus Entertainment are a big company with many talented developers who have experience in sims, hope they pass the torch to one of them.

 

This is pretty much how it works. Cut your loss and write off all the accrued hours. Still a loss, but also tax deductible.

 

Firefly tested their route on Xbox, as Xbox has a beta branch. However they have no way to test it on PS5 as PS doesn't have something like that. From what I understand, DTG port it over to console and they can test it on dev kits and in case of Xbox on the consoles itself.

 

Older gamers want realism.
Younger gamers want GTA 6 and Forza Horizon 6.

My two lads are 9 and 15 years-old, and both said Metro Rivals looked boring. I don't think either would mention Metro Rivals to their classmates at school, for fear of being laughed out of the classroom.

 

no, please god, NO!

 

Vern, the "1000 players" is the maximum ever recorded playing simultaneously, worldwide, and on Steam alone.The number of copies sold across all platforms is therefore vastly over 1000 as no game in history has had 100% of its players online at once.

There are almost 700 reviews for the title just on Steam. Considering industry estimations are that about 1-5% of players leave reviews, even taking the higher figure of 5% would mean 14,000 copies sold. That's still less than the estimated sales volumes shown on third-party sites like PlayTracker and Gamalytic, which are showing numbers around the 20,000 mark.

If you take into account the fact that many of the purchases will be for children who are unlikely to write up reviews, and whose parents will mostly have no interest in doing so, I think it's safe to use a "purchase-to-review" figure of 3%.. That bumps up the number of copies sold to around 23,000. Using the same average of £32, that's a sales volume of £736,000 on Steam a little more than £32,000.

Then you have to factor in sales on Epic Games, Xbox, PS5 and the upcoming Switch and Switch 2 versions, all of which combined typically make up 65% of sales for arcade / casual games like WoS. A figure of 2 million copies acrross all platforms is therefore not an unreasonable assumption, particularly given the amount of positive attention the game received on social media at launch. For argument's sake lets cut that by 50% and say it "only" sold a conservative 1,000,000 copies.... That's still over 32 million quid.

I'm pretty sure DTG have recouped their development costs on WoS.

JB

 

Exactly. I'm not interested in, say, the Victoria line which is completely underground. But the Central line, or the Metropolitan line? Definitely.

 

The Northern Line pre ATO would be very nice too.

 

I like to LOVE on Thomas (nothing against the original show though) and had planned on defending the "double digit" figures, as they could be explained away by the primary user base being in school but at least according to Steam DB (which granted only looks at Steam and not consoles) puts it's busiest periods during the night UK time meaning it seems to be more popular overseas.

That said, the number of players has dropped off massively considering it's been out for two days shy of a month, yes consoles will have a much bigger player base (generally kiddies will be on consoles rather than proper gaming rigs) but it should still be somewhat concerning.

Anyway moving back to Metro Rivals, well it's a shame it got canned though personally I am indifferent and would not have been remotely interested in it. On the accounting front it is an interesting one, yes they can get a tax write-off for a lot of it's development costs but since they waited until the new financial year to announce its cancellation it means we can't see those figures until they are published next year, roughly November/December time...

To be honest I was a little worried at how quiet the forums had become in terms of involvement of DTG personnel but at least Alex appeared to share the update notes. If DTG were to fold, I'd hope it was after the JT Preston-Crewe route dropped as I can live without a TSW7 and of course, we are still waiting for patches that are in QA so it's not like we'd miss out on them...

 

How you made the jump from 23,000 units sold on Steam to 2,000,000 across all platforms I don't know.
The likelihood is that the game has sold maybe 100,000 units across all platforms, with a net ASP (average sale price, so after platform fees, taxes, chargebacks etc) is more like $18. So at a push the game might have generated in the range of $1.8m - which after development costs, marketing and licensing fees may have managed to break-even.

Even with reusing existing TSW tech the game will have tied up a lot of employees over a solid amount of time.

 

Alot of Subway / Metro routes tend to go outside the dark gloomy tunnels. NYC Subway is a great example of this. Some lines your above the roads and streets for half of the journey which can allow for really great views. The other half is tunnel with stations lol. The Berlin U Bahn is the same

 

In the Netherlands you have an overground metro line between Rotterdam and The Hague. There is also an overground metro line from Rotterdam to Hoek van Holland beach (Hoek van Holland translates to Corner of Holland). Both lines where train lines in the past, but converted to metro lines. Both are quite interesting lines, especially the line to the beach. I would love to see those line in TSW or a separate game.

 

The Chicago "L" being another great example, only one or two lines have an underground section and that is barely a couple of miles long but the rest is either at grade or elevated. Pity that CTA won't license out to TSW, I'd give a heck of a lot for the Green Line to be available :/